Sometime between the stage debut of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" and the arrival seven years later of the Rolling Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in the Richmond section of London in 1963, Mary Quant, the daughter of British schoolteachers, married Alexander Plunket Greene, an art school classmate who was ecumenical in his interests. Precisely when their union was legitimized -- or even vaguely when -- Ms. Quant could not recollect during a visit to New York a few weeks ago.
"Do you remember?" she asked, turning to her assistant on the fourth floor of Henri Bendel, before answering her own question. "It was sometime during the early 60's," Ms. Quant estimated. "I'm not sure when because, you know, so much happened during the 60's." Records indicate that Ms. Quant married in 1957. She had one child with Mr. Plunket Greene, a son, who she will tell you is now "29 or 30."
Ms. Quant's career and her great contribution to fashion history ?? the popularization of the miniskirt ?? evolved, of course, during a period in which the societal premium placed on marriage and motherhood came under no small degree of scrutiny. It was a time long before magazines like Martha Stewart Weddings emerged as their own kind of pornography. The specific social circumstances surrounding the mini's birth and life seem worth recalling right now, when the runways have tried to resurrect the exceedingly abbreviated hemline.
The spring 2003 collections in New York, Milan and Paris offered miniskirts and dresses that barely grazed the upper thigh, in bulk quantities not seen since "Laugh-In." In Milan especially -- where even Prada, the fashion world's foremost purveyor of sexual remove, succumbed to the mood with hot pants -- models were sent down runways looking as if the designers had determined that grown women suddenly wanted to look like aging competitive figure skaters, loose of virtue.
Meanwhile, Ms. Quant herself has returned to fashion with a line of girlish clothes, about 30 looks, mostly in jersey, that include her comparatively quaint versions of the miniskirt and dress.
Four years ago, Ms. Quant received backing from a Japanese company and has since opened more than 50 cosmetics shops in Japan and one in New York. Her new line of garments will make their debut in this country at Henri Bendel in two weeks. The clothes have the familiar whimsical feel of her past work.
"About a year ago, I was talking to people in the vintage business," Ed Burstell, the general manager of Bendel's, explained. "And they said: `Guess what's being snatched up? Mary Quant.' Then you look at what's happening on the runway, and it really seemed like the moment."
But can the mini's currency ever be truly revitalized? In recent weeks, sale racks in Manhattan have been lined with the relatively few versions that designers turned out for fall. And many stores do not plan to stock them for spring in proportion to the space they occupied on runways. At Stanley Korshak in Dallas, for instance, skirts were bought sparingly, with very specific customers in mind.
"Miniskirts are simply never going to sell as well as something above the knee," said Robert Burke, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. "What's interesting," he added, "is who buys them."
And who buys them, as Ikram Goldman, the owner of Ikram, a Chicago boutique, explained, are women in their 30's, 40's and 50's. She recently sold three Azzedine Ala?a minis to such women, all of whom intended to wear them over leggings or pants.
When miniskirts captured the world's attention in the 60's, even becoming the subject of a Tennessee court case as late as 1969, when high school girls fought suspension for wearing them, it was teenagers and very young girls who advocated the lengths that put legs on display. Ms. Quant said that not long after she introduced skirts that fell just above the knee at her fabled shop, Bazaar, on King's Road, young women began demanding more diminutive versions.
"If I didn't make them short enough, the Chelsea girls, who had wonderful legs, would get out the scissors and shorten the skirts themselves," she recalled. Eventually, Ms. Quant's skirts, which arrived in the United States through a partnership with J. C. Penney in the mid-60's, were reduced to a microsize of about five inches, to capitulate to demand.
In Ms. Quant's interpretation, though, as well as that of Andr?? Courr??ges and Pierre Cardin (haute couture's progenitors of the mini), short, typically A-line skirts worn with heavy tights rendered the female body prepubescently geometric, androgynous. In the last decade or so, feminist theorists like Linda Benn DeLibero, among others, have come to view the mini (along with the shapeless body type it idealized) not simply as a signifier of sexual liberation but as an agent of rebellion against the mature female form and the cultural imperative that forced women into childbearing.
"I grew up not wanting to grow up," Ms. Quant once said. "Growing up seemed terrible. To me, it was awful. Children were free and sane, and grown-ups were hideous."
What is perhaps most striking about the miniskirt's declared revival today is its near-total absence in teenage life, despite an unprecedented acceptance of bare skin.
"Even in good skirt years, we don't sell them," said Chris Edgar, the chief executive of Delia's, the popular retailer of clothing for adolescent girls. And Emily Leslie, a junior at Bronxville High School in Bronxville, N.Y., confirmed observations that adults often make during weekend visits to malls. "Girls wear tight pants and skimpy shirts," she said. "They show cleavage, but none of my friends wear short skirts."
Young adults, under the tutelage of Britney Spears, have disavowed the leg and created an erogenous zone out of the stomach, with tank tops that rest well above the hip and thong-revealing jeans that sit considerably south of the hip. The effect is completely at odds with the original mini's intent; the body is left looking pneumatic, womanly, fertile.
It should not go unremarked that this style has come to prevail at a time when books urging women to marry early (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Why There Are No Good Men Left," most recently) land in stores with the regularity of the full moon, and television shows with women competing for husbands command astonishing ratings.
"You see fashion trying to recycle the mini over and over," said Valerie Steele, the acting director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "But the cultural moment is over. We've stepped in that river already."
(Agencies via Xinhua January 3, 2003)
